Saturday, December 27, 2014

I received for Christmas the least
looked-forward-to book I have ever received: John Cleese’s “So, Anyway…”.

Cleese, of course, is a founder of Monty
Python, the wildly successful British comedy group that took male
teenagers by storm in the early 1970s and was considered inheritor to The
Beatles’ mantle as conquerors of America by none other than George Harrison (according to his friend Eric Idle, another Python).Cleese is also co-creator, co-writer,
producer and star of what has been called the best TV sitcom ever created,
Fawlty Towers.

Thus, for a certain generation—i.e. male
baby-boomers who came of age when Monty Python was laying waste to all previous
notions of what was funny—a book, any book, by John Cleese would be a no-brainer for Christmas, or
Hanukkah, or even New Year’s Eve.

But despite having grown up on the original
Python series aired on PBS, and despite having seen the group live at City Center in
1976, and despite having seriously considered traveling to London to see the
group’s final reunion at the O2 Center last summer, I had no interest in this
book, the reason being an especially scathing review in the Wall Street Journal
by one Wesley Stace, a British author who also performs as a singer-songwriter
by the name of John Wesley Harding, the title of an old Bob Dylan album (go
figure).

In his review, John Wesley Harding/Wesley Stace
wrote pretty much what you might expect of a book by Cleese, whose intensely
intellectual approach to comedy, and the well-known years he spent in
psycho-therapy, tends to make him appear to be the John Lennon of the Pythons—Lennon
being the ex-Beatle who had the nerve to dismiss his achievements as a Fab Four
by saying, “We were just a band that made it very very big, that’s all.”

And that’s the tone of the Wesley Stace/Wesley
Harding review in a nutshell:

The title “So, Anyway . . .” implies a cavalcade of convivial anecdotes
and lengthy digressions. This is a grave misrepresentation, partly because of
an occasional reluctance on Mr. Cleese’s part (“actually telling you about [the
Footlights does] not fill me with excitement”) and partly because promising
stories are derailed by the decision to narrate them in the voice of Mr. Cleese
playing a crashing bore at a party in a Python sketch…

It’s a difficult book to enjoy and “The Last Laugh” would perhaps have
been better a title, so often does Mr. Cleese give himself the punch-line in
age-old disputes. He rehearses every perceived slight. The “undeserved insult”
of being overlooked for a position of authority at school left a life long
scar: “I believe that this moment changed my perspective on the world.” His ill
feeling towards his dead mother is likewise undimmed by time...

But receive the book for Christmas I did, and
am glad I opened it and began reading it.

Because if, as I suspect he did not, Hardy
Wesley/Stace Wesley had in fact read the entire book, as I have, he would have
discovered that [We interrupt here to
explain that book reviewers frequently do not read the actual book before
reviewing it; many reviewers, in fact, rely on summaries provided by the book
publisher for scheduling and cost reasons, as we learned during the publication
of “Pilgrimage to Warren Buffett’s Omaha,” when a reviewer took issue with a
blog post the author had written, mistaking it for the book—Ed.] what John
Cleese has done is write a tight, funny, comprehensive-but-compact biography
that zeros in on the whys and wherefores of how he, and, indirectly, the
Pythons, got to be what they became.

He starts at the beginning, when and where he
was born, and while the stuff about his father and mother (and grandparents,
too) may seem irrelevant and mean-spirited to Stacely/Hardley, it’s all part of
explaining how he developed the sense of humor he did.

The fact that Cleese had a tough time with his mother
explains a lot, while the fact that he really liked and admired his father
seems jarring at first, considering his recurring role as the demented
authoritarian figure in Python sketches, but that role is explained by his
memories of being bullied at school, followed by this insight:

“Peter
Cook [Another revolutionary British
comedian—Ed.] always said that he quite deliberately staved off bullying by
being funny.I think in my case it was
less a conscious activity—more ‘Oh, that felt nice.’ And, as I realized, I became funnier, of
course, because the spark is always there.So the bullying faded away, and I started, for the first time, to make
friends.”

In fact, the entire book is supremely well written in
the Cleese manner—there is no “as told to” laziness here—and while the
anecdotes are not, as the reviewer would seem to prefer, “convivial,” they all
serve to tell a point: the point being, “here’s where it came from.”

Along the way, we learn where the germ of certain bits
were developed (e.g. Sybil Fawtly’s description of her paranoid mother—“And she’s always
on about men following her; I don’t know what she thinks they’re going to do to
her, vomit on her, Basil says”—came
directly from Cleese’s phobic mother); why he and Graham Chapman worked so well as a
writing team (“When you begin to write comedy, the biggest worry is simply: is
this funny?Writing with a partner ensures you get
priceless feedback, and Graham and I worked together well: we found each other
funny and when we did laugh, we really laughed); and how the path to Python let
through unknown (in America, at least) radio and TV shows like “I’m Sorry, I’ll
Read That Again,”“At Last The 1948
Show” and“The Frost Report.”

To be sure, Cleese aims zingers at old archaic
conventions and the occasional petty personality who offended his sense of
justice, but those asides are overwhelmed by the surprisingly affectionate portraits of writers, producers and directors who helped him along the way (including David Frost, despite the fact that Eric Idle gave a merciless portrayal of Frost as “Timmy Williams” in the Python series). All in all, it is hardly the cranky kind of stuff Wembley/Stadium would have
readers believe, and even the occasional gibes all serve the main point of explaining where all this great
stuff came from.

As, for example, when Cleese reprints parts of several old sketches from various pre-Python shows, including a couple that later made it
into Python sketches, either on film or on records, as well as some
laugh-out-loud bits that did not.

And for anyone interested in
creativity—especially of the breakthough, Python kind—this is invaluable, and
pleasurable reading.

Wembley Stadium notwithstanding.

Jeff
Matthews

Author
“Secrets in Plain Sight: Business and Investing Secrets of Warren Buffett”

The content contained in this blog represents only
the opinions of Mr. Matthews. Mr. Matthews also acts as an advisor and clients
advised by Mr. Matthews may hold either long or short positions in securities
of various companies discussed in the blog based upon Mr. Matthews’
recommendations. This commentary in no way constitutes investment advice, and
should never be relied on in making an investment decision, ever. Also, this
blog is not a solicitation of business by Mr. Matthews: all inquiries will be
ignored. The content herein is intended solely for the entertainment of the
reader, and the author.

Friday, December 19, 2014

Well, Michael Bublé’s computer is still
releasing holiday songs, which is the worst we can say about this year’s holiday
music survey.The best we can say—and it is truly good news—is that The Boss’s
hard-driving, live version of “Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town,” done entirely without
computer-aidedBublé-style vocals, seems to be gaining much deserved traction. Meanwhile, one of our previous also-ran mentions in the What-Did-We-Do-To-Deserve-This? category, one Taylor Swift, deserves a big boo-yah for telling the Spotify algorithms to stuff it, pulling her entire catalogue from the automated listening service—including, by definition, the song mentioned here last year, which should be no tragedy to

Spotify customers anyhow.

As for our
usual review of the latest rock memoirs, which tend to flood the bookshelves
right about now—only to turn up in the mark-down bins come spring, which is
when your editor actually buys them—the best read during brief trips to our
local, increasingly down-on-its-heals Barnes & Noble, has to be Mick
Fleetwood’s “Play On.”

Fleetwood is
one of the most underrated drummers in rock music, being the kind who drives the
beat without histrionics and stays well behind the kit while the front-people
do their thing (it was Fleetwood and fellow Mac bassist John McVie who rescued “Werewolves of London” for Warren Zevon and producer Jackson Browne, after the house band could not make the song work) so his remembrances of the formation of Fleetwood Mac are insightful
and compelling even for those—including your editor—who were never big
Fleetwood Mac fans.

Currently
priced at $30.79 at Barnes & Noble for the hard copy version, or $21.00 on
Amazon, I’ll wait until spring and pick it up for $5.99—sorry Mick, but that’s
the business we’re in.

Merry
Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and a Good New Year to all!

—JM,
December 19, 2014

2013
Editor’s Note:The most unnerving aspect to this
year’s holiday music survey is the unavoidable, near-totalitarian presence
of an insipid cover version of George Michael’s
already-plenty-insipid-for-our-taste-thank-you-very-much “Last Christmas,”
which, as we point out below has one of the most inane choruses ever written
(no mean feat there), which wouldn’t be so bad except it is repeated over and
over and over until you want to hand yourself over to Vladimir Putin’s security
forces and let them do their worst.

The
perpetrator of this latest holiday music outrage is, it turns out, Taylor
Swift, about whom your editor knows nothing except she adds exceedingly little
to a song that needed plenty of help to begin with.

But,
as always with these annual surveys, your editor digresses.

On
the happier side of the music world, this last year has seen a number of
excellent new rock memoirs, of which Kinks front-man and songwriting genius Ray
Davies’ is the most interesting.

The
centerpiece of the story line in Ray’s “Americana” is his getting shot
by a mugger in New Orleans some years back, but interspersing that tale he
manages to tell much of the story of his career.

If
you want to read how Ray came up with classics like “Better Things” (why
couldn’t that be a Christmas song? It’s as much about the
holidays as “Same Old Lang Syne,” about which your editor has plenty to say
later on), this is your book.

Neil
Young’s “Waging Heavy Peace,” which came out last year, is even better
than “Americana,” however, and more fun to keep picking up when the mood
strikes: Neil’s recollections are loopy, digressive, and admittedly unsure in
some cases (at one point he compares his memory of a drug bust with
Stephen Stills’ recollection of the same drug bust—and given that Neil only
stopped “smoking weed” the year before writing the book, as he admits, it’s no
wonder their recollections are very different), but like all things Neil Young,
he says what he means and means what he says.

And
if you’re wondering where songs come from—great songs, eternal songs—Neil’s
book is the place to begin.

Would
that a holiday song may one day spring from the fecund mind of Neil Young
himself, for while he professes more of a Native American religious spirit than
a Judeo-Christian one, either way, it would be so long Taylor Swift.

Merry
Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and a Good New Year to all!

—JM,
December 7, 2013

2012
Editor’s Note: We interrupt this holiday music review to
bring you a potential stocking-stuffer that ought to bring tidings of good
cheer...

2011
Editor’s Note: Back by popular demand, we’ll again try to keep
this year’s update brief…but past performance would tell you not to hold your
breath. Here goes.

Our
annual holiday music survey—highly biased, rankly unscientific and in no way
comprehensive—covers new ground this year, to wit: the SiriusXM
all-holiday-music channel.

Actually,
there are two such channels courtesy of the satellite radio
monopolists at SiriusXM. There’s one for “traditional” music of the Bing
Crosby kind, in which human beings sing traditional Christmas songs while other
human beings play musical instruments to accompany those songs; and there’s
another channel for everything else, including the Auto-Tune-dependent
sensation Michael Bublé, who has only gotten more popular—unfortunately—this
year, along with a new presence not entirely unexpected but nonetheless
frightening in its implications: Justin Bieber.

Enough
said about that, for our main beef with SiriusXM is not the
presence of yet another teen idol on the holiday music scene.

Our
beef lies with the soul-less quality of the entire SiriusXM gestalt, which
requires its three thousand channels to carry songs strictly
on the basis of whether they share either a common date of issue (as on
the “40’s at 4,” “50’s at 5,” “60’s at 6” et al channels),
or a common target audience demographic.

Among
the later, for example is the “Classic Vinyl” channel, which is
essentially a “Classic Rock” channel (“Classic Rock” being a Baby Boomer
euphemism for what our parents knew as “Oldies” radio) that plays the
WNEW-FM playlist from around 1968 to 1978. And nothing else.

And
there is the “Classic Rewind” channel, which is another Oldies
channel that plays the WPLR-FM playlist from about 1979 to the late 1980s. And
nothing else.

Then
there’s “The Bridge,” a Baby Boomer euphemism for “Easy Listening.” It
plays Oldies of the James Taylor/Carole King/Jackson Browne vein.

And
nothing else.

Certainly
there are one or two such channels that manage to jump around between
genres (The Spectrum is worthwhile on that score). But, in the main, each
SiriusXM channel is tightly focused on a specific, narrowly defined
demographic...sometimes scarily so.

Here we’re thinking of the “Metal” channel, which plays loosely
defined “songs” that consist of young men screaming their apocalyptic
guts out above what appears to be a single, head-banging, machine-gun-style
guitar-and-drumming musical track that never, ever changes.

You marvel at where these guys came from, what portion of the domestic
methamphetamine supply they consume, and how many serial killers might be
listening to “Metal” channel at the very same moment as you.

If
Beavis and Butt-Head could afford a car, this would be their channel.

Unfortunately,
no matter which channel you pick and who the purported “DJ” may be
(there are a lot of old-time, smokey-voiced, recognizable DJs on the various
Sirius Oldies channels) you’ll hear a sequence of songs that all sound
like a computerized random-number-generator picked ‘em.

Listening
to the “60's at 6” channel, for example, you may hear a great Beatles single
like “Hello, Goodbye” from 1967, followed by the wretchedly excessive
“MacAurther Park” from 1968, followed by an unrecognizable chart-topper from
1962 that nobody plays anymore because it wasn’t any good even in 1962.

The
listener ends up flipping around from channel to channel and wondering why the
bandwidth-happy SiriusXM monopolists don't just give each artist its own
channel, as they in fact do for Springsteen, Elvis and Sinatra.
Those are channels you might expect to find, but there is, oddly enough,
no Bob Marley or Rolling Stones channel—and, head-scratcher of all
head-scratchers, no Beatles channel.

In
fact, the absence of The Beatles from the SiriusXM digital bandwidth relative
to, say, the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac, is one the great mysteries of our age.

After
all, the Beatles individually and collectively contributed 27of the Rolling
Stone Top 500 Songs of All-Time or 5.4% of those songs, yet they get nowhere
near 5.4% of the SiriusXM airplay, whether on “Classic
Vinyl,” “Classic Rewind,” “The Bridge,” “60's on
6, ” “70's on 7,” “The Spectrum” or any of the other
three thousand channels here.

You
quite literally have as much chance of hearing “Snoopy and the Red Barron” on
SiriusXM as “Revolution.”

So
why then is there a Jimmy Buffett channel (called
“Margaritaville,” of course)?

Having
gotten all that off our chest, we can move on, since SiriusXM’s holiday
channels add no new material to our annual survey because most of the songs are
widely played everywhere else.

Furthermore,
we’ve been asked to assemble a “Top Ten Worst” list of holiday songs
for this review. The problem is there are just so many, as we’ll be
getting to shortly. Rod Stewart’s somnambulant “My Favorite Things,”
which sounds like he's reading the lyrics from a child’s book of verses, is
right up there, while Dan Fogelberg’s “Same Old Lang Syne” stands out in
any crowd of non-favorites.

Easier,
then, to simply identify the All-Time, Number One, No-Question-About-It
NotMakingThisUp Worst Holiday Song of All Time, and let everyone else argue
about the remaining 9.

It
is “The 12 Pains of Christmas.”

This
so-called comedy song takeoff on “The 12 Days of Christmas,” a pleasant
English Christmas carol discovered by a U.S. schoolteacher from Milwaukee and
used by her in a Christmas pageant in 1910, is an easily forgettable
humorous novelty song that is neither novel or humorous, in any way.

It
isn’t even fun writing about, so we won’t bother: we’ll simply
move on to something pleasant, which happens to be an entirely
different sort of humorous novelty song that is both novel and humorous,
and, therefore, well worth a mention here.

We’re
talking about the wonderfully bizarre, catchy, Klezmer-style cover
of “Must Be Santa,” from Bob Dylan’s 2009 Christmas
album, “Christmas in the Heart.” (Yes, Bob Dylan made a Christmas
album.)

The
music is fast and cheerful, and Dylan’s low, growly voice is almost
indistinguishable from Tom Waits. (The truly bizarre music video is not
to be missed, watch it here.) After you get over the initial
shock of hearing Bob Dylan singing what most Baby Boomer parents will recall
being a Raffi song, it becomes impossible to not enjoy.

Another
glaring absence from our previous years’ commentary is neither novel or
humorous, and inconceivably does not appear to qualify for the SiriusXM
random-song-generator holiday song playlist despite being many-times more
worthwhile than most of the SiriusXM catalogue, whether holiday-themed or not.

The
song is “2000 Miles” by the Pretenders, and it belongs on anybody’s Holiday Top
Ten.

If
hearing Chrissie Hynde on that original song (she’s also recorded some good
Christmas covers, including one with the Blind Boys of Alabama) doesn’t get you
in a mellow holiday mood, nothing will.

Merry
Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and Good New Year to all.

—JM,
December 4, 2011

2010
Editor’s Note: Back for the third consecutive year by
popular demand, we’ll try to keep this year’s update brief—but don’t count on
it.

For
starters, we’re going to plug a book: Keith Richards’ autobiography, “Life,”
which happens to be one of the best books ever written—and we don’t just mean
“Best in the Category of ‘Memoirs by Nearly-Dead Rock Stars’.”

It
is a great book, period.

The
story of how ‘Keef’ (as he signs sweet letters to his Mum while rampaging
across America), Brian and Mick developed the Rolling Stones’ sound, for
example, is worth the price alone (in short, they worked really hard;
but the full story is much better than that).

Yet
there’s more—much more. Guitarists can soak up how Keith created his own guitar
sound; drummers will learn—if they didn’t already know—Charlie Watts’ high-hat
trick (and from whom he stole it); while songwriters had better prepare
themselves to be depressed at how Mick wrote songs (‘As fast as his hand
could write the words, he wrote the lyrics,’ according to one session man
who watched him write “Brown Sugar”).

And
that’s just the rock-and-roll stuff.

The
sex-and-drugs stuff is also there, and the author lays it all out in his
unfettered, matter-of-fact, straightforward style, often with the first-person
help of friends and others-who-where-there (and presumably of sounder mind and
body than you-know-who: the drug and alcohol intake is truly staggering) who
write of their own experiences with the band.

Okay,
you may say, but how exactly is Keith Richards’ autobiography relevant
to our annual review of holiday songs?

Well,
while furtively reading snatches of ‘Life’ during a stop at the
local Borders (we expect to see the book under the Christmas tree sometime
around the 25th of this month, hint-hint), we happened to hear another musical
legend perform one of our favorite offbeat Christmas songs in the background,
and it occurred to your Editor that of all the bands out there that could have
done that same kind of interesting, worthwhile Christmas song, The Rolling
Stones probably top the list.

What
with Keef’s bluesy undertones and Mick’s commercial-but-sinister instincts on
top, it would have certainly made this review, for better or worse. (Along
these lines, The Kinks’ cynical, working-class “Father Christmas” is one
of the all-time greats, and doesn’t get nearly enough air-time these days.)

Now,
for the record, the offbeat Christmas song that triggered this excursion was “’Zat
You Santa Claus?”—the Louis Armstrong and The Commanders version from the
1950’s. (The song was later covered, like everything else but the Raffi
catalogue, by Harry Connick, Jr.)

Starting
out with jingle bells, blowing winds and a slide-whistle, you might initially
dismiss “’Zat You?” as a sadly commercial attempt by Armstrong to get in
on the Christmas song thing, except that his familiar, Mack-the-Knife-style
vocal comes over a terrific backbeat that turns it into what we’d nominate for
Funkiest Christmas Song Ever Recorded.

It is a
delight to hear, and the fact that it is suddenly getting more air-time this
season is a step-up in quality for the entire category—or would be, if not for
the apparent installation of Wham!’s “Last Christmas” in the pantheon of
Christmas Classics.

A
1980’s electro-synth Brit-Pop timepiece, “Last Christmas” combines a
somewhat catchy tune with lyrics that make a trapped listener attempt to open
the car door even at high speeds to get away:

Last
Christmas, I gave you my heart

But the
very next day you gave it away

This year

To save
me from tears,

I gave it
to someone special

Considering
the fact that the songwriter (Wham!’s gay front-man, George Michael) decided to
repeat that chorus six times, the full banality of the lyric eventually gives
way to incredulity: “Let me get this straight,” you begin to ask
yourself. “This year he’s giving his heart to ‘someone special’... so who’d
he give it to last year? The mailman?”

“Last
Christmas” does have the distinction of being the biggest selling single in
UK history that never made it to Number 1. Furthermore, all royalties from the
single were donated to Ethiopian famine relief, the same cause which led to
creation of what turned out to be the actual Number 1 UK single that year, “Do
They Know It’s Christmas?”

“Do
They Know…” is a song that has received some push from readers to receive
an honorable mention in these pages, and while it is certainly an interesting
timepiece, with much earnest participation from the likes of Sting, Bono and
even Sir Paul, it is not nearly as worthwhile as an album that seems just as
prevalent these days: A Charlie Brown Christmas by jazz
pianist Vince Guaraldi.

How
a jazz pianist was hired to create the music for a TV special with cartoon
characters is this: the producer heard Guaraldi’s classic instrumental “Cast
Your Fate to the Wind” on the radio while taking a cab across the Golden
Gate Bridge.

One
thing led to another, and thanks to that odd bit of chance, future generations
will have the immense pleasure of hearing a timeless, unique work of art every
year around this time. (A second odd tidbit for our West Coast readers:
Guaraldi died while staying at the Red Cottage Inn, in Menlo Park—of a heart attack,
however, and not the usual, more gruesome fate of musicians who die in hotels.)

One
second-to-last note before we move on: we have been heavily lobbied by certain,
er, close relations to include Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas is
You” as a worthwhile holiday song—despite our previously expressed
misgivings about her contribution to the genre (see below).

And
we have to admit, her “All I Want…” leaves behind the incessant vocal
pyrotechnics that made some of her other Christmas covers (“Oh Holy Night,”
for example) unbearable, at least to our ears.

In
this case she seems to trust the song to take care of itself, which it does in
fine, driving, upbeat style. Now, as Your Editor previously hinted, all he wants
for Christmas is Keef’s book. And it had better be there, if, as previously
noted, you get our drift.

Finally,
and speaking of autobiographies, we happened to read Andy Williams’ own book
this past year and must report that our reference to Williams below was overly
harsh. For one thing, his book is as honest as Keef's; for another, as a singer
not necessarily born with the vocal equipment of, say, Mariah Carey, the man
worked at his craft and succeeded mightily where many others failed.

Which,
we might add, is, after all, the hope of this season.

And so,
we wish for a Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and Good New Year to all.

—JM,
December 13, 2010

2009
Editor’s Note: Back by popular demand, what follows is our
year-end sampling of the Christmas songs playing incessantly on a radio station
near you, and it demands from your editor only a few updates this holiday
season.

For
starters, we have not heard the dreaded duet of Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey
singing “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” thus far in 2009, and for this we are most
grateful.

Indeed,
if it turns out that their recording has been confiscated by Government
Authorities for use as an alternative to lethal injections, we’ll consider
ourselves a positive force for society.

On
the other hand, we are sorry to report an offset to that cheery development, in
the form of a surge in playing time for Barry Manilow’s chirpy imitation of the
classic Bing Crosby/Andrew Sisters version of “Jingle Bells.”

For
the record, “Jingle Bells” was written in 1857...for Thanksgiving, not for Christmas.
And it’s hard to imagine making a better version than that recorded by Bing and
the three Andrew Sisters 86 years later.

But
Manilow, it seems, didn’t bother to try. Instead, Barry and his back-up
group, called Expos, simply copied Bing’s recording, right down to that stutter
in the Andrews Sisters’ unique, roller-coaster vocals on the choruses, as well
as Bing’s breezy, improvised, “oh we’re gonna have a lotta fun” throwaway line
on the last chorus.

Sharp-eared
readers might say, “Well, so what else would you expect from a guy who sang ‘I
Write the Songs’…which was in fact written by somebody else?”

We
can’t argue with that, but we will point out another annoyance this year: the
enlarged presence of Rod Stewart in the Christmas play-lists.

Don’t
get us wrong: we like Rod Stewart—at least, the Rod Stewart who gave the world
what Your Editor still considers the best coming-of-age song ever written and
recorded: “Every Picture Tells a Story.”

It’s
the Rod Stewart who gave us “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” we’re less crazy
about. So too the Rod who chose to cover “My Favorite Things” (for the
definitive version of that classic, see: ‘Bennett, Tony’) and “Baby It’s Cold
Outside” with Dolly Parton (for an only slightly more offensive version of this
one, see: ‘Simpson, Jessica’ and ‘Lachey, Nick’).

As
an antidote to Rod, we suggest several doses of Jack Johnson’s sly, understated
“Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” which seems to be gaining recognition, and
anything by James Taylor—especially his darkly melancholic “Have Yourself a
Merry Little Christmas.”

Of
all the singers who recorded versions of this last—and Sinatra’s might be the
best—it is Taylor, a former junkie, who probably expresses more of the intended
spirit of this disarmingly titled song.

After
all, the original lyric ended not with the upbeat “Have yourself a merry little
Christmas, let your heart be light/Next year all our troubles will be out of
sight,” but with this:

“Have
yourself a merry little Christmas, it may be your last/Next year we may all be
living in the past.”

No,
we are not making that up. The good news is it should keep Barry Manilow
from be covering it any time soon.

JM—December
19, 2009

Wednesday,
December 24, 2008

Shazam!
From the Boss to the King to John & Paul (But Not George or Ringo), Not
to Mention Jessica & Nick

Like
everyone else out there, we’ve been hearing Christmas songs since the day our
local radio station switched to holiday music sometime around, oh, July 4th, it
feels like.

And
while it may just be a symptom of our own aging, the 24/7 holiday music
programming appears to have stretched the song quality pool from what once
seemed Olympic-deep to, nowadays, more of a wading pool-depth.

What
we recall in our youth to be a handful of mostly good, listenable songs—Nat
King Cole’s incomparable cover of “The Christmas Song” (written by an
insufferable bore: more on that later); Bing’s mellow, smoky, “White
Christmas”; and even Brenda Lee’s country-tinged “Rockin’ Around the Christmas
Tree” (recorded when she was 13: try to get your mind around that)—played over
and over a few days a year…has evolved into a thousand mediocre-at-best covers
played non-stop for months on end.

Does
anybody else out there wonder why Elvis bothered mumbling his way through “Here
Comes Santa Claus”? It actually sounds like Elvis doing a parody of
Elvis—as if he can’t wait to get the thing over with. Fortunately The King does
get it over with, in just 1 minute, 54 seconds.

Along
with that and all the other covers, there are, occasionally, the odd original
Christmas songs—the oddest of all surely being Dan Fogelburg’s “Same Old Lang
Syne.”

You’ve
heard it: the singer meets his old lover in a grocery store, she drops her purse,
they laugh, they cry, they get drunk and realize their lives have been a
waste…and, oh, the snow turns to rain.

So
how, exactly, did that become a Christmas song?

Then
there’s ex-Beatle Paul McCartney’s “Wonderful Christmastime,” which combines an
annoyingly catchy beat with dreadful lyrics, something McCartney often did when
John Lennon wasn't around. (After all, it was Lennon who replaced McCartney’s
banal, teeny-boppish opening line for “I Saw Her Standing There”—“She was just
seventeen/Never been a beauty queen” is what McCartney originally wrote—with
the more suggestive “She was just seventeen/You know what I mean,” thereby
turning a mediocre time-piece into a classic.)

But
Lennon was not around to save “Wonderful Christmastime” even though McCartney
actually recorded this relatively new Christmas standard nearly thirty years
ago, before Lennon was shot.

It
rightfully lay dormant until the advent of All-Christmas-All-The-Time
programming a couple of years ago. Fortunately, by way of offset, Lennon’s own
downbeat but enormously catchy “Happy Xmas (War is Over)” is played about as
frequently as “Wonderful Christmastime.”

Who
but John Lennon would start a Christmas song: “And so this is Christmas/And
what have you done...”? Of course, who but Paul McCartney would start a
Christmas song, “The moon is right/The spirit’s up?”

If
anything explains the Beatles’ breakup better than these two songs, we haven’t
heard it.

Now,
we don’t normally pay much attention to Christmas songs. If it isn’t one of the
aforementioned, or an old standard sung by Nat, Bing, Frank, Tony, Ella and a
few others, we’d be clueless.

But
thanks to a remarkable new technology, we here at NotMakingThisUp suddenly
found ourselves able to distinguish, for example, which blandly indistinguishable
female voice sings which blandly indistinguishable version of “O Holy
Night”—Kelly Clarkson, Celine Dion, or Mariah Carey—without any effort at all.

The
technology is Shazam—an iPhone application that might possibly have received
the greatest amount of buzz for the least amount of apparent usefulness since
cameras on cell phones first came out.

For
readers who haven’t seen the ads or heard about Shazam’s wonders from a
breathless sub-25 year old, Shazam software lets you point your iPhone towards
any source of recorded music, like a car radio, the speaker in a Starbucks, or
even the jukebox in a bar—and learn what song is playing.

Shazam
does this by recording a selection of the music and analyzing the data. It then
displays the name of the song, the artist, the album, as well as lyrics, a band
biography and other doodads right there on the iPhone.

Now,
you may well ask, what possible use could there be for identifying a song
playing in a bar?

And
unless you’re a music critic or a song-obsessed sub-25 year old, we’re still
not sure.

But
we can say that Shazam is pretty cool. In the course of testing it on a batch
of Christmas songs—playing on a standard, nothing-special, low-fi kitchen
radio—heard from across the room, without making the least effort to get the
iPhone close to the source of the music, Shazam figured out every song but one
(a nondescript version of a nondescript song that it never could get) without a
hitch.

And,
as a result, we can now report the following:

1)
It is astounding how many Christmas songs are out there nowadays, most of them
not worth identifying, Shazam or no Shazam;

2)
All Christmas covers recorded in the last 10 years sound pretty much alike, as
if they all use the same backing track, and thus require something like Shazam
to distinguish one from the other;

3)
Nobody has yet done a cover version of Dan Fogelburg's “Same Old Lang Syne,”
which may be the truest sign of Hope in the holiday season;

4)
None of this matters because Mariah Carey screwed up the entire holiday song
thing, anyway.

Now,
why, you may ask, would we pick on Mariah Carey, as opposed to, say, someone
who can’t actually sing?

Well,
her “O Holy Night” happened to be the first song in our mini-marathon, and it
really does seem to have turned Christmas song interpretation into a kind of
vocal competitive gymnastics aimed strictly at showing off how much of the
singer's five-octave vocal range can be used, not merely within this one
particular song, but within each measure of the song.

In
fact Mariah's voice jumps around so much it sounds like somebody in the studio
is tickling her while she’s singing.

More
sedate than Mariah, and possibly less harmful to the general category, The
Carpenters’ version of “(There’s No Place Like) Home for the Holidays” comes on
next, and it makes you think you’re listening to an Amtrak commercial rather
than a Christmas song (“From Atlantic to Pacific/Gee, the traffic is terrific!”),
so innocuous and manufactured it sounds.

Johnny
Mathis is similarly harmless, although his oddly eunuch-like voice can give you
the creeps, if you really think about it. Mercifully, his version of “It’s
Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas” is short enough (2:16) that you don’t
think about it for long.

Now,
without Shazam we never would have known the precise time duration of that
song.

On
the other hand, we would we never have been able to identify the perpetrators
of what may be the single greatest travesty of the holiday season—Jessica
Simpson and Nick Lachey, singing “Baby it’s Cold Outside.”

“Singing”
is actually too strong a word for what they do. Simpson’s voice barely rises
above a whisper, and you cringe when she reaches for a note, although she does
manage to hit the last, sustained “outside,” no doubt thanks to the magic of
electronics.

Thus
the major downside of Shazam might be that it can promote distinctly
anti-social behavior: having correctly identified who was responsible for this
blight on holiday radio music, the listener might decide that if they ever ran
across the pair in his or her car while singing along with the radio too loudly
to notice, they wouldn’t stop to identify the bodies.

Fortunately,
the bad taste left by that so-called duet is washed away when Nat King Cole’s
“The Christmas Song” comes on next.

Thanks
to Shazam, we learn that this is actually the fourth version
Nat recorded. The man worked at his craft, and it shows. This is the best
version of the song on record, by anyone, and probably one of the two or three
best Christmas songs out there, period.

The
second those strings sweetly announce the tune, you relax, and by the time
Cole’s smoky, gorgeous voice begins to sing, you’re in a distinctly Christmas
mood like no other recording ever creates.

(Unfortunately,
the song’s actual writer, Mel Tormé, had the personality of a man perpetually
seething for not getting proper recognition for having written one of the most
popular Christmas songs of all time. We did not learn this from Shazam: we once
saw Tormé perform at a small lounge, during which he managed to mention that
he, not Nat King Cole, wrote “The Christmas Song”—as if this common
misperception was still on everybody’s mind 35 years later. When that news
flash did not seem to make the appropriate impression on the audience, he later
broke off singing to chew out a less-than-attentive audience member, completely
destroying the mood for the rest of the set.)

Like
that long-ago performance by the "Velvet Fog," the pleasant sensation
left behind by Cole’s “Christmas Song” is quickly soured, this time by a male
singer performing “Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow” in the manner of
Harry Connick, Jr. doing a second-rate version of Sinatra.

Who
is this guy, we wonder?

Shazam
tells us it’s Michael Bublé. We are pondering how such a vocal lightweight
became such a sensation in recent years—the answer must surely be electronics,
because his voice, very distinctly at times, sounds like it has been synthesized—when
John Lennon’s “Happy Xmas” comes on.

It’s
a great song, demonstrating as it does Lennon’s advice to David Bowie on how to
write a song: “Say what you mean, make it rhyme and give it a backbeat.” The
fact that Lennon had the best voice in rock and roll also helps.

Unfortunately,
his wife had the worst voice in rock and roll, and a brief downer it is when
Yoko comes in on the chorus like a banshee. (Fortunately she is quickly drowned
out by the children’s chorus from the Harlem Community Choir.)

The
other songs in our Shazam song-identification session are, we fear, too many to
relate.

Sinatra,
of course; Kelly Clarkson, an American Idol winner who essentially does a pale
Mariah Carey impersonation; Blandy—er, Andy Williams; and one of the best: Tony
Bennett.

Then
there’s Willie Nelson, who has a terrific, understated way of doing any song he
wants—but sounds completely out of place singing “Frosty the Snowman.” One
wonders exactly what kind of white powder Willie was thinking about while he
was recording this, if you get our drift.

Oh,
and there’s Coldplay’s “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” which pairs
the sweetest piano with the worst voice in any single Christmas song we heard;
Amy Grant, a kind of female Andy Williams; the Ronettes, who are genuinely
terrific—a great beat, no nonsense, and Ronnie singing her heart out with that
New York accent; and then Mariah again, this time doing “Silent Night” with
that same roller-coaster vocal gargling.

Gene
Autry’s all-too-popular version of “Here Comes Santa Claus” would be bearable
except that he pronounces it “Santee Closs,” which is unfortunate in a song in
which that word appears like 274 times. ‘N Sync is likewise unbearable doing “O
Holy Night” a cappella, with harmonies the Brits would call cringe-making, and
Mariah-type warbling to boot.

Winding
things down is Dan Fogelburg’s aforementioned “Same Old Lang Syne,” and here we
need to vent a little: something about the way he sings “liquor store”—he pronounces
it “leeker store”—never fails to provoke powerful radio-smashing adrenalin
surges.

Fortunately,
we suppress those urges today, because the Shazam experiment concludes with one
of the best Christmas songs ever recorded. Better than Bing, and maybe even
better than Nat, depending on your mood.

Yes,
this song was recorded live, and despite its age (more than 25 years old), the
thing still jumps out of the radio and grabs you.

Now,
as Shazam informs us, this particular recording was actually the B-side of a
single release called “My Hometown.” (Back in the day, kids, “singles” came
with two songs, one on each side of a record: the “A” side was intended to be
the hit song; the “B” side was, until the Beatles came along, for throwaway
stuff.)

Fortunately
nobody threw this one away.

Springsteen
begins the familiar song with some audience patter and actual jingle bells;
then he starts to sing and the band comes to life. Things move along smoothly
through the verse and chorus...until ace drummer Max Weinberg kicks it into
high gear and the band roars into a fast shuffle that takes the thing into a
different realm altogether.

Feeding
off the audience, The Boss sings so hard his voice slightly breaks at times.
Then he quiets down before roaring back into a tear-the-roof-off chorus,
sometimes dropping words and laughing as he goes.

This
is real music—recorded in 1975 during a concert at the C.W. Post College—with
no retakes, no production effects, and no electronic vocal repairs, either.

Try
doing that some time, Jessica and Nick.

Actually,
come to think of it, please don’t.

Merry
Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and a Good New Year to all.

Jeff
Matthews

Author
“Secrets in Plain Sight: Business and Investing Secrets of Warren Buffett”

The content contained in this blog represents only
the opinions of Mr. Matthews. Mr. Matthews also acts as an advisor and clients
advised by Mr. Matthews may hold either long or short positions in securities
of various companies discussed in the blog based upon Mr. Matthews’
recommendations. This commentary in no way constitutes investment advice, and
should never be relied on in making an investment decision, ever. Also, this
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